House Backs Telecom Bill Favoring Phone Companies — WASHINGTON, June 8 — The House of Representatives approved the most extensive telecommunications legislation in a decade on Thursday, largely ratifying the policy agenda of the nation's largest telephone companies. — The bill passed by a lopsided vote of 321 to 101.

New Net neutrality plan may ruffle feathers — news analysis Internet companies that have been lobbying for stiff Net neutrality regulations might be having second thoughts right about now. — A new proposal in the U.S. House of Representatives takes the concept of mandatory Net neutrality …

Hollywood and the hackers — Motion Picture Association President Dan Glickman locks horns with Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow over big media's war with the internet. — The biggest pirate movie site on the Internet was raided by police a few days ago.

5 hot products for the future — The Institute for the Future couldn't get clients to read its trend forecasts. So it started giving away prescient product ideas instead. — (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Trendspotting is serious business. So much so that the Institute for the Future …

Crave Talk: Is Nintendo the apple of Apple's eye? — In 1995 Apple launched its first games console, the Bandai Pippin. It was based on a 66MHz PowerPC processor and ran a stripped-down version of Mac OS 7. The market for the device was not immediately obvious.

Vonage Founder Stands To Profit Despite IPO Flop — Vonage Holdings Corp. chairman and founder Jeffrey Citron has a paper profit of almost a half-billion dollars — six times his initial investment in the company — from shares he bought before the company's initial public offering.

Google's GBuy Could Be 'Revolutionary' — RBC Capital Markets maintained an "outperform" rating on Google in light of the impending launch of the company's online payment system, currently known as "GBuy." — Consumers using GBuy, which is set for release on June 28, will be taken off the merchant's site to complete the payment.

New cell phone screens battery friendly — SAN FRANCISCO—A new breed of screens for cell phones, now in development, is getting back to nature. — Qualcomm and others are promoting new screen technology for handhelds and mobile devices that can stay on all day without sapping battery life, thanks to the sun or liquids.

.NET Framework 3.0 — When speaking to developers about WinFX one question that repeatedly comes up is, "WinFX sounds great, but what happens to .NET?" . NET Framework has becomes the most successful developer platform in the world. Developers know and love .NET.

wikiCalc is now in Beta — I finally got the Beta 0.91 version of wikiCalc posted late last night. I finished the main coding last week, but there were lots of details finishing the help files, last minute bug fixes, website updates, etc. You will find links to it on the wikiCalc Beta home page.

Mashing Up a Commons — Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? Or at least not a complete one? — That's what occurred to me last Sunday night, as Claus Dahl and I sat talking in a smoky Copenhagen bistro. The subject was public spaces.

Look Out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo Answers! — We wrote last month of Yahoo Answers hitting the 10 million answers posted mark, an impressive accomplishment especially given the low interest and poor take-up answer search has traditionally had in the US. But some new stats add fuel …

D.C. Sues InPhonic Over Rebate Restrictions — The D.C. attorney general is suing InPhonic Inc., accusing it of failing to deliver on rebates after the District-based retailer of wireless services and cellphones racked up more than 2,000 consumer complaints over the past three years.

Google Research prototypes ambient audio contextual content — A team from Google Research has developed a prototype system that uses a home computer's internal microphone to listen to the ambient audio in a room, determine what is being watched on TV and offer web-based supplemental information …